An interview with Steve Gregory, Head of Client Engagement, Inspired.

July 25, 2016

You’ve been with Inspired for a couple of months now. In that time, what have you noticed about the industry?

For the last couple of months I have immersed myself in attending industry meetings, seminars, exhibitions and conferences, as well as catching up with clients and partners to understand their views and pinpoint the challenges they are currently facing.

It is interesting that the obvious challenges have broadly remained the same; clients want more audience engagement but with smaller budgets, and there is an ever increasing pressure to properly measure the return on the investment made to prove the value of the experience for the business.

Have you uncovered any new challenges through your conversations within the industry?

One thing that has definitely changed is the audience. I don’t just mean the profile of the audience and marketing to Millennials. We are all much more marketing savvy these days, with a high exposure to brands’ messages, activities and promotions on a daily basis. Not only that, we are all time poor, and so the time we do have is far more precious to us. Because of this we are more demanding on the quality and the value of an experience as we need to justify the time we spend attending it.

Therefore, I see that the big challenge now is how to design experiences that achieve this.

Given you have uncovered this significant challenge, how would you go about solving it?

At Inspired we want to work strategically with our clients in order to solve their business challenges that require audience engagement.

It is too easy to press repeat and do the same conferences and exhibitions year on year and hope that they keep delivering the required results. However, as I said before the audience has changed and it will keep changing as the world around us continues to do so.

Our approach is to put the audience at the heart of every challenge and business objective and design an experience that focuses on the wants, needs and desires of both parties.

So how does this manifest itself in reality?

By starting with what we are trying to achieve and who we want to communicate to, rather than how we would deliver the experience (like the venue or the catering for example), we can ensure it has a lasting impact on the audience, influences their behaviour, and therefore ultimately achieves the desired outcomes and real value back to the business.

Inspired is an independently-owned live experience agency, combining events industry pedigree with the agility and personal service of a small consultancy.